From a performance point of view, having separate physical disks would be best. That way, each machine can access its disk without interfering with the other machines, thus avoiding a bottleneck. Using a single physical disk for all machines would likely be cheaper, though.

From a reliability point of view, you would also benefit from using several physical disks. That way, if one disk dies, you don't lose all the virtual machines. Of course, for optimum reliability, you'd probably want a RAID setup: something like RAID 5 or RAID 6.

I agree with capi that for maximum performance of the discs then having one per VM is a good solution but for security of the drives / redundancy then a raid5 or 6 array of them all is the way forward.

When it comes to an ESX server kind of environment then it's recommended a raid10 for max performance for things like sql servers where there's a lot of read/writes to the discs. All other servers are recommend to be on a raid5 array.

I agree with capi that for maximum performance of the discs then having one per VM is a good solution but for security of the drives / redundancy then a raid5 or 6 array of them all is the way forward.

When it comes to an ESX server kind of environment then it's recommended a raid10 for max performance for things like sql servers where there's a lot of read/writes to the discs. All other servers are recommend to be on a raid5 array.

Sorry to jump in - I'm hoping to set up ESXi so I can implement a virtual domain for my educational and testing purposes. Ideally, I'd like to be able to install 2 x W2K3 and 2 x XP Pro clients. I'm also thinking of installing a flavour of Linux, such as BT4.

I'm not familiar with Dell 2900 but I do know that I'll have to check carefully that any hardware that I use will be compatible with ESXi.

I've done some googling and see that Dell 2900 comes with Dual or Quad core Xeon (up to 3.5GHz) and up to 48GB RAM. What would be suitable specs for my requirements? I stress that it's for a test lab, rather than a production network so I'd like to keep the cost as low as possible. I'm aware of the comments earlier in the thread about having multiple smaller hard drives rather than one jumbo hard drive.

Yes Dell 2900 is supported . Basically the CPU model you have to see from compatibility point of view. As far as number of cores are concerened then 4 core will give better performance that 2 core. Use the following link so know more about compatibility of CPU/system/IO/SAN.Other Models are also compatable from Dell/HP/IBM

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